PROFESSOR: There Is A Big, Gaping Flaw In The New Satoshi Study

Yesterday, we
wrote up a study from Aston University in Birmingham, England
that broke down linguistic matches between 13 individuals
"regularly referred to as candidates" and Satoshi Nakamoto, the
apparently pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

Of the group, they narrowed it down to Nick Szabo, a writer and
blogger.

As we discussed in our article, these were not the first
independent researchers to conclude Szabo is Satoshi. Yet Szabo
has refuted the charge (albeit indirectly), and is not even
seeking to avoid attention: Although he has not returned multiple
emails and phone calls, he attended a Bitcoin conference at
Princeton University in March.

We emailed some of the professors who attended the conference to
ask about their interactions with Szabo there. Many said they
either did not encounter him, or if they did, only for a moment.

Jeremy Clark is an assistant professor for
Information Systems Engineering at
Concordia University in Montreal. He said he'd met Szabo for the
first time there, and chatted with him during the dinner.

He also sent back the following critique of the Aston study,
which we thought was worth posting:

I think the recent evidence linking Nick to Satoshi is grossly
insufficient. I buy that out of 13 people, his writing is the
most similar. Actually, if you take 13 people, SOMEONE will
always be the most close by definition. If you look at the common
phrasing they found, you don't see anything that you wouldn't see
in nearly any crypto paper on digital cash or time-stamping (and
there are a ton).

Further, I've seen nothing to indicate that Nick can write even
one line of code, while Satoshi implemented a very complex
peer-to-peer network, to say nothing of the cryptography
involved. Nick also still maintains that his bit gold proposal is
a better design than Bitcoin so I don't see why he'd propose one
and deploy something different.

I can't help but wonder if Linux was released under a pseudonym,
would anyone guess that it was written by a Finnish masters
student? Someone that was otherwise unknown? Of course not.
Someone would compare the writing to Richard Stallman, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and some super random patent holders,
and declare Stallman the winner. Then Newsweek would find him at
the end of his driveway, annoyed and in a crumpled t-shirt,
chewing on something he pulled off his foot. :)

UPDATE: Jack Grieve, the Aston University lecturer who
led the study, has responded in an email (emphasis
ours):

... to clarify, the task we took on was to compare the
bitcoin paper to the writings of the top 11 candidates, as
identified by the media. Nothing more than that, so it seems
to me these criticism are irrelevant. We are not claiming that
this set of authors is complete, we are not claiming Szabo is the
definitely author of the bitcoin paper, and we are certainly not
claiming that he necessarily wrote the bitcoin computer code or
the various other texts attributed to Nakamoto. We are simply
claiming that out of this specific group of 11 authors, that he
is the best match for the bitcoin paper. I think most people who
take the time to look at the data, especially given the features
we have identified, would agree. Also, it is not the case that
this process would always results in the identification of an
author. For example, had Szabo not been in our dataset, we would
not have claimed that any of the other authors match, as none of
the other authors even come close.

Also, the general information online about Szabo is that he
has a degree in computer science from the University of
Washington--although that may be incorrect. It turns out he was
never a law professor, for example. Nevertheless, there is
computer code included in some of Szabo's other papers, so the
claim that he has never written a line of code is demonstrably
false. That said, I think there is some evidence that he did not
write the bitcoin computer code, even the small amount of code in
the bitcoin paper, but again that simply isn't what we were
investigating.